A great idea with a great future – confidence high as Wazoku takes its growth financing to £1.25m

03 April 2014 – Idea management firm Wazoku has completed a new funding round, taking its total growth financing to £1.25m. The investment will allow Wazoku to accelerate product development and drive further growth into new markets. The company has also added further experience and talent to its management team, with the recruitment of former Huddle VP, Jon Landau.

The funding round was led by investors including the Cambridge Angels investment group, which had previously invested in Wazoku’s seed funding in early 2013 and New Model Venture Capital, the FCA authorised fund manager set up by the founders of Find Invest Grow. The funding comes as Wazoku continues to grow revenues strongly and takes its idea management platform global.

Jon Landau, Huddle’s first hire and architect of its global customer strategy, joins Wazoku as Chief Operating Officer. He brings with him a wealth of experience in growing a SaaS business from seed funding to a global leader, with Huddle now used by more than 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies.

“It is an incredibly exciting time to join the company and there is a genuine opportunity for Wazoku to become a major global player in the idea management industry,” he said. “I left Huddle to join a company that I believe is set to become the next big British tech success story. Wazoku already works with some of the biggest names in the world and it is the calibre of clients it has secured that make it a truly exciting and credible prospect. My focus, as we continue to develop and grow as a business, is to ensure that our customers remain central to everything we do.”

Wazoku has enjoyed a period of continued and impressive growth. Building on a hugely successful 2013, so far in 2014 it has won major new customers in Shop Direct, which includes online retail brands such as Very.co.uk, Littlewoods.com, isme.com and KandCo.com, Capita – in conjunction with its software partner tibbr – and Hackney Borough Council. It has also signed an international partnership with innovation consultancy Innocentrix that will see its software sold in South Africa, as organisations all over the world recognise the value of good ideas.

“We are seeing that as the broader economic outlook improves, innovation is moving back into focus and it is a great time to be in a sector as it matures into more mainstream, strategic adoption,” said Simon Hill, Founder and CEO, Wazoku. “Too many good ideas are lost in business and as the right idea can be a genuine game-changer, organisations are more willing than ever to invest in the tools to capture and develop them. It is a really exciting time for us as a business as we are seeing global demand for our software and have a highly experienced team to ensure we meet this demand.”

Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight software allows organisations to crowdsource ideas from internal or external communities. It provides structure for ideas, somewhere for employees, partners, customers or the general public to submit, discuss and develop them; a central place where ideas are captured, evaluated and analysed, ensuring the best ideas are selected and implemented.

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About Wazoku
Founded in 2011, Wazoku is now regarded as one of the world’s fasting growing B2B software firms. Its flexible and feature-rich Idea Spotlight platform allows organisations such as the NHS, BBC and Capita to crowdsource ideas from internal or external communities and provides a central place for those ideas to be captured, discussed and analysed.

Wazoku is the only idea management supplier listed on the UK Government’s G-Cloud Framework and was the only UK firm recognised by Gartner in its ‘Who’s Who In Innovation Management Technology’ report.